4 March 2002

Now that was a good weekend.

Friday night, we went out to dinner with K.T. and Colleen - a little Italian restaurant not far from my parents' house. It used to be strictly a pizza joint, but it went a little higher class a few years ago. I love their food, but they always pick one person and screw up their order totally. Usually it's Matt, but this time it was Colleen who got a sausage calzone instead of pepperoni. (I had veal over pasta with a lemon garlic sauce, and every bite made me happy.)

Friday night we had a Hall session that had me rolling with laughter.

Saturday we slept in late, which is always a good thing to do on a Saturday. Matt went to play Frisbee around noon, and I mostly just sat around the house. Mid-afternoon, we drove down to my parents' house to see them. They told us about their trip to Germany and brought out the presents (mostly chocolate, for which I am Not Complaining). It included these two molded-chocolate plaques, which are almost too pretty to eat... But which I'm sure we'll eat anyway.

We showed them Matt's car, and then we all piled in and went down to the furniture store to look at coffee tables. Surprise number one - I remembered without too much trouble which of about twenty showrooms the table I'd liked was in, and how to get there. Surprise number two - they hadn't moved it to a different showroom.

Matt liked it, which made me happy, but I told him he should look around and see what else they had. What happened then... you'll get a different story from Matt and I. Matt says I found fault with every other table he so much as looked at. My recollection is that my parents kept pointing out that the other tables were too big, and that I only actually nixed about three of them.

But Matt's feet were hurting from playing Frisbee, and he liked the table I'd picked out well enough, so we decided to go ahead and get it. Since this is a somewhat belated Christmas present, my parents picked up most of the cost of the coffee table and two matching end tables, leaving us with only about $100 to pay, which was very nice of them.

Then we lost my mom, and had a merry adventure trying to find her, and then we all went to dinner.

We'd wanted to go to the Outback steakhouse, but they had a two and a half hour wait for a table, which was more than we were willing to put up with. We went next door to Cheddar's, instead, and had a lovely dinner while my mother told us all about the toilets and toilet paper in Germany.

After dinner, we went back to my parents' house for a while, and then we took our leave and went to talk to K.T. for a while. Eventually, we went home and Matt and K.T. and Karen got online and had a Hall session, while I - for a change - went to bed reasonably early. (Mind you, "reasonably early" on a weekend is about 1:30 in the morning.) Matt came to bed around four. I don't think I even turned over, much less woke up.

Sunday morning I got up and doodled around on the computer for a bit, then went and got domestic. I made a big double-batch of Cream of Reuben Soup (which just barely fit into my pot) and a batch of chocolate chip cookies. I got eleven servings out of the soup - five containers in the freezer, three in the 'fridge, and then three bowls of soup between Matt and I for lunch and dinner. The cookies came out to six or seven dozen, if you don't count all the batter I ate while I was making them.

When that was done, I had a Hall session with Jeff, then went outside and changed the county sticker on my car (a task two weeks overdue - I'm lucky I haven't been ticketed). Then I came back inside and had a Hall session with K.T. and Rachel.

Somewhere in there, we did the laundry, too. And then around nine, when Karen had gotten home from work, she and K.T. and I had our long-awaited session with our relatively new characters, which was so much fun that it took me a good while to get to sleep, even though I didn't get to bed until nearly 12:30.

I'm actually pretty alert today, so I'm hoping we'll get started with the design phase of the project I'm on. I'm just about tired of documentation, and I haven't written any code (unless you count HTML) for almost three months now.

Despite Jeff's bad reaction to the shift in tone, I had a fantastic time with the Charts and Chances session on Friday. The adventuring party we encountered was stolen directly from The Goonies, played by Karen (the "Chunk" equivalent), Matt ("Mouth" - of course!), and K.T. (the "Mikey," "Data," and "Andy" characters - she dropped "Brand" and "Stef" for simplicity's sake).

The interplay between the characters simply couldn't have been more funny - even if you don't usually read session transcripts, I highly recommend this one.

And then last night's session, with Bastian and Cat and Dawn and Dusk, was just amazing. I'd been braced for a bit of a letdown, after all the anticipation, but it went better than I could have hoped. I confess to being somewhat bemused by the situation, though - Matt can't stand the characters. At least, he can't stand Bastian or Dawn or Dusk. "SCUM," he says.

(Which continually tempts me to call that group the New Scum, a la Transmetropolitan.) And he's right - they are scum... Bastian is an assassin, and Dawn and Dusk are a pair of mages-for-hire who aren't especially troubled by moral values. But they're such fun to play! I'm looking forward to a fair number of future sessions with them.

I need to expand my soundtrack for Dawn and Dusk, though... Right now it's only got half an hour's worth of songs in the playlist. And they're all good songs, but half an hour isn't nearly enough time!

--Liz